More ice-cream adventures in London - ChinChin Labs, Camden

So, as I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of nice ice-cream, particularly Italian-style ice-cream.  I went, recently (while feeling a little bad for going anywhere other than Gelupo) to the Chin Chin Labs for liquid nitrogen ice-cream.  To be completely honest, I  expected it to be a bit of a gimmick. And, it was - there were silly outfits and a sales patter about the chemical process, etc.  But it was also extremely good ice-cream, some of the best I've ever tasted.  I had ginger wine sorbet with bits of ginger biscuit in it which was amazing - somehow, it didn't just taste of ginger, it tasted of ginger wine.  Mmmmm.  My lovely husband had cinnamon french toast ice cream which they make by infusing milk with cinnamon french toast.  So good.  So so good.

Places I love in London: Gelupo

So, a while back, I said that I'd write - as the  mood struck me - about my favourite places to eat and drink in London.  Today:  Gelupo.  I love Italian ice-cream.  It was love at first taste.  Italian ice-cream somehow managest to taste more like its flavour than the actual flavour does - Italian lemon sorbet is more lemoney than actual lemons, Italian blood orange sorbet tastes more like oranges than they do..  Above all else, Italian ice-cream tastes like Italy - like sunshine.

I have sampled a lot of Italian ice-cream in London in a quest to find this experience closer to home.  It was a tough job but someone had to do it.  There is a lot of lovely Italian ice-cream in London.  Marine Ices is reliably tasty and has a great range of sorbets, especially.  Gelateria Danielli once served me some truly extraodinary blackberry sorbet.  Cafe Chai, down the road from where I used to work, was a great source of "I've had a bad day, I need some Italian ice-cream" pickmeups (and, again, is particularly good for sorbets - I used to particularly enjoy their pink grapefuit sorbet).

But the winner has to be Gelupo.    The first time I had their blood orange granita, I spent the whole weekend talking about it to everyone I met.  Yes, I was a granita bore. But it actually was that good.  I actually don't usually like granita that much, too icy and not enough fruit, but Gelupo's granitas are amongst the nicest things I have ever eaten.  The sorbets are delicious too - the blood orange one is lovely but so too is the clementine and..  well, basically, they're all good.  And, then, the ice-cream itself - I had the peanut butter ice cream yesterday with a scoop of bitter chocolate and.. well, suffice to say, I just want to talk about it for the rest of the week..

Lemon curd ice cream

Yummy lemon curd ice cream

We have a terrific ice cream maker and are always on the hunt for ice cream recipes to make in it.  We ran across this one for lemon curd ice cream that seemed almost too simple to be true - buy lemon curd, double cream and a lemon, insert into ice cream maker and then eat delicious ice cream?  OK, then!  It really is that simple and it is very tasty.*  Next up for us, using the same recipe with lime curd.  What could possibly go wrong?

*It is very rich, though, I think it would probably work best as one scoop with another dessert (apple pie perhaps?  or ginger cake?) rather than on its own as we had it.